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At the hearing, President Obama’s Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, argued that if the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare’s federal exchange subsidies are illegal, “I don’t think it’s possible to say that there would be no harm. The tax credits will be cut off immediately and you will have very significant, very adverse effects immediately for millions of people in many states in their insurance markets.”

This whole argument is irrelevant. Chief Justice John Roberts said, “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

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Is Obama's lawyer telling the Supreme Court the following: "If not a single one of the 50 states opened up a marketplace, the ObamaCare law states very clearly that anybody in those 50 states could still get a tax subsidy by enrolling in the federal government exchange."

1. If the law clearly states---according to Obama's lawyer---that the federal government exchange tax subsidy would be open to anyone even to those persons who live in a state without its own exchange, then why would any state be motivated to open up its own exchange, when it could easily pass the cost and headaches of an exchange to the federal government's own exchange?

2. It makes no sense to me for a state to open up its own exchange, if the federal government, according to Obama's lawyer, would automatically give subsidies to all applications to its own federal exchange, if a state did not have its own exchange.

3. As I see it, the only way that the states would ever consider opening its own exchange is if the federal government somehow put tremendous pressure on the states to do so.

4. And the key pressure would be this: Enrollees could receive tax subsidies only if their state opened up its own exchange.

5. The Supreme Court Justices should have asked Obama's lawyer this question: "Are you telling us that if not a single state opened up an exchange/marketplace, the ObamaCare law says that the federal government exchange would automatically grant subsidies to all enrollees from all 50 states?"

6. Protecting itself: I think that the authors of the ObamaCare law tried to protect the federal government (1) from the possibility that not a single state would open up its own exchange and (2) from the nightmare that thousands of enrollees would overwhelm its own federal exchange by emphasizing in the law that enrollees could get tax subsidies ONLY if they joined their state's exchange.